Although the battle between JBoss on one side of the application server paradigm and BEA and IBM on the other side gets most of the attention, there's another player on the open-source app server front that's worthy of attention.

Back in the bad old days of the Internet boom and irrational exuberance, a lot of capital was thrown down a rat hole known as managed services. But the managed-services business model is back with a vengeance, and there is a war over who is going to control this burgeoning sector of the market.